Political Dig

Bill Clinton Warns Of Trump And Bannon Bringing Us To ‘The Edge Of Destruction’

Bill Clinton made his firs major public appearance since Donald Trump’s inauguration as the keynote speaker at a Brookings Institute event. Clinton warned of Trump’s mentality leading us to “the edge of destruction.”

“People who claim to want the nation-state are actually trying to have a pan-national movement to institutionalize separatism and division within borders all over the world,” Clinton said. “It’s like we’re all having an identity crisis at once—and it is an inevitable consequence of the economic and social changes that have occurred at an increasingly rapid pace.”

Clinton didn’t mention Trump or his chief counselor Stephen Bannon, but his comments offered a rebuke of Trump-ian form of nationalist populism. Trump has been sharing the same message since he started his campaign, “America First.” A message built on the primacy of domestic American interests over those of the world.

Bannon refers to himself as an “economic nationalist,” and, as the head of Breitbart, he has shown his resentment of immigrants and racial and religious minorities living in America.

“We have to find a way to bring simple, personal decency and trust back to our politics,” Clinton said.

“The whole history of humankind is basically the definition of who is us and who is them, and the question of whether we should all live under the same set of rules,” Bill Clinton said. He added that sometimes people “have found more political success and met the deep psychic needs people have had to feel that their identity requires them to be juxtaposed against someone else.”

“This is a very old story” Clinton said. “It’s as old as the Holy Land, and much older. Ever since the first people stood up on the East African savanna, ever since the first families and clans, ever since people encountered the other. It is a very old story. And it always comes down to two things—are we going to live in an us-and-them world, or a world that we live in together?”

Clinton finished up by saying that we should live by Rabin’s model of negotiation and compromise, stating that “if you got that, in every age and time, the challenges we face can be resolved in a way to keep us going forward, instead of taking us to the edge of our destruction.”